So you have been practicing your particular creative skill for years, you do it on your coffee break or commute, you fit it in around the kids. You’ve spent time and money on practising and have become accomplished. You wish you had more time to be creative, it’s something that gets put on the back burner because – well, all the things. But you are often surprised that your friends ask you, “how do you do that?” or say “I wish I knew how to do that, I’ve always wanted to learn”. You know that perhaps you could show them, perhaps you could even run your own workshop and show a few people and turn it into a small sideline. And then, bonus, you get to not feel guilty for spending time on something you love doing, because it’s for a purpose!

Maybe you’ve been looking for that little sideline where you can turn your hobby into profit.

But where do you even start?

Well, I can help.

A friend and I ran popular monthly craft evenings for a large group of regular attenders, over a couple of years. Here are some tips that I learnt on how to run a craft event successfully and make a profit doing so. Whilst your workshop content is different, these tips will also apply to any type of workshop. Also – (bonus!) scroll down for a printable workshop planner and a list of mistakes we made that you’ll want to avoid!

Project and Customer

Decide on the project that you want to make available. Decide on your ideal customer and their skill level, this will have implications on how much time they will need from you individually, equipment you’ll need to provide or source, and options on design.

Consider the equipment you already have or can borrow or invest in some if you plan on doing this regularly.

Equipment and Materials

Depending on the number of people attending you will need to consider how much equipment you’ll need so that people don’t get frustrated waiting to use it. You could ask people to bring basic tools with them, depending on your craft/art people often have basic tools like scissors, pins and needles, brushes, pens and notebooks. Always have extra tools with you including, scissors, glue, pencils, kitchen towel, bin bags and a first aid kit. Have table top bins for easy clean up.

You’ll want firm numbers of attendees before you spend money on materials or you could have a lot left over, and this will eat into any profits.

Venue

Decide on a venue, hire a hall, or ask a cafe if you can rent it out for the evening. You will need to consider the cost of the room hire and negotiate whether refreshments are included or not. Think about how many people you can realistically host in the space and demonstrate your skill and project creation to.

You’ll need to consider the surfaces you’ll use and provide coverings and maybe aprons for people to protect their clothes.

Welcome and Presentation

Think about how you will welcome people to your workshop, be friendly and help to put them at ease, they could be feeling as nervous as you!

Consider how you are going to present the tutorial, you may want written instructions for people to follow or present to them yourself. How you will describe what you are doing? What is the skill level of people who are attending? Remember you may know words or techniques that they don’t. Be prepared to describe what you are doing as if to a complete beginner. It would be a good idea to have several examples with you including different options in terms of colours, materials, if options will be available. Factor in time to help your participants one on one.

Pricing

Don’t forget to factor all your costs for pricing; marketing, your time, materials and equipment provided, hall hire and refreshments. Decide on how many people you can realistically host and demonstrate to and sell tickets at the full price in advance.

Selling tickets

Think about how to communicate to your ideal customer, what would appeal to her in terms of event advertising design, and where would you be most likely to reach her? Ways to reach her include posters, social media, email. Include good photos of the beautiful item that they can make. How will you accept payment for the event? Perhaps use an online ticketing app or paypal.

Information

How much information will people need sent to them before your event? Think about any potential questions they might have (they’ll come up with more!) and prepare an email in advance. This might include details such as a map, parking details, any equipment they might want to bring.

Refreshments

What you will offer as refreshments? Free tea, coffee and water is often expected. Where will these be served? It is best to keep them away from any project work in case of spillages. Will they be always available or only at a specific time?

Other considerations

Toilet facilities at the venue, check that they are clean and stocked.

Lighting at the venue, will people be able to see well?

Are there enough power sockets available, will people be able to charge their devices? (You’ll want them to share photos of your workshop in action – great marketing!)

How will people transport any project items they’ve created home? You may need to provide bags.

If you are running this as a business you will need to further consider; registering as self employed, insurance, keeping accounts.

It’s worth noting that this is a great sideline or add-on for another of your endeavours, for example if you sell your items on etsy or work on contracts, freelance or are self-employed. It is a good way to raise awareness and add to your portfolio career, as a stand alone it can be labour intensive and you are unlikely to generate large profits.

Mistakes we made

Having too many different types of craft available. Although this was popular, it made the sale estimating/cost covering difficult because people only paid for what they made on the night.
– Solution
Have one or two things available to make with limited options on offer.

Pricing not including our time spent organising and marketing.
-Solution
Go simple on craft available = less time spent. Price your workshop considering all your time spent working on it.

Selling tickets at a deposit (nominal) price and then people paying for what they made on the night. (Too many craft options = left over materials) People not showing up on the night.
-Solution
Work out your costs and profit, and sell tickets accordingly at full price in advance.

A venue where the set up took a lot of effort and time.
-Solution
Choose a venue carefully, are tables and chairs are already set up? ie a cafe is ideal. These days there are purpose built workshop spaces or co-working spaces available for hire.

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I was asked to help create “ambiance” for a cheese and wine evening in a multi-purpose room in our church centre where people would want to come and feel welcomed and cared for. Here follows what we did in the hope that you can get some ideas for an event or party of yours. Please note that I wish I had taken more photos for you and the ones I did take were rushed!

These were the four specific challenges needed to be overcome to create a chic, evening feel for this multi-purpose space.

multiple notice boards around the room with multi-coloured children’s artwork, and no consistency to style.

lots of brown painted doors and woodwork that are not an appetising colour of brown and dominate the space.

overhead very bright strip lighting.

room size being too large for a cosy feel with uncertain number of guests. It is possible to make the space larger or smaller by closing or removing doors.

Approach

When decorating a room for an event or party, there are four areas to start your planning with; theme, neutralising the room, space, lighting, and decoration.

Theme

The event was a cheese and wine evening with the decor needing to be similar and reused if possible the following week for an Alpha supper.

My initial thoughts for a theme was to take cheese and wine as a starting point to try and create a rustic, wine bar and deli feel. That meant food type materials and utilising items associated with those food types in the decor. Think wine bottles, crates, hampers, brown paper, coffee sacks, and herbs. The budget was limited and the first place to start was to borrow and use what I and the church already had.

Neutralising the room

Some rooms are perfect blank canvases and you can skip this step – hurrah! Other rooms are a little more tricky, like the room we had that is used as a preschool 4 days a week and is also the church centre used for children’s church and coffee – hence the noticeboards and children’s artwork.

The first step was how to overcome challenge 1 and 2 (noticeboards and brown woodwork). It would be too much to remove and replace everything on the walls so in order to make the space calm and relaxed then the visual stimulation of the notice boards needed to be neutralised. This would create a blank canvas to draw attention to the purpose and function of the evening and create a chilled out vibe. My solution was to cover the notice boards with rolls of brown paper, while my first instinct was to avoid brown – (because of the dominance of brown painted doors) – brown paper was cheap and easy to get hold of, the paper was also a more neutral tone of brown than the paint and more appealing but not clashing with it to draw attention to it either. It also has associations with vintage food and cheese wrapping, perfect for the theme.

Collection of our decorating equipment, note the brown paintwork and noticeboards in the background!

Space

We shut off one third of the room space by keeping the glass paned doors closed and covered them with the brown paper, which created a cosier space without the windows.

Lighting

To create softer lighting more suited to an evening, we used lots of candles in lanterns and dinner candles in wine bottles on small tables. Across the middle of the room is a beam from where I hung a light feature I created. To make it I used a hanging wreath that I have which has hooks in, I made some tassels from twine and hung them at different lengths, I added some rope wrapped around it and a tasseled curtain tie back. I found a battery powered string of lights that had funky light bulbs on and wrapped those around. The whole thing functioned as a rustic funky looking chandelier and added light. The photos don’t do it justice but it was an interesting talking point.

The chandelier and some rustic looking bunting made from twine and coffee sack flags helped to bring the ceiling height down to add to the cosy feel.

Lighting chandelier, coffee sack bunting

I covered three polystyrene wreath forms in strips of hessian and coffee sacks and hung three of them together with more twine.

Feasts for the eyes

A big feature for setting the scene, welcome and ambiance was creating a visual vignette in the eyeline of guests as they walked through the door. We borrowed some wicker hampers and wine crates and wicker bottle carriers. I stacked them up interestingly, added a large pot plant, some potted herbs and candle lanterns. Because the crates were quite deep, I placed the herb pots on upturned paper cups to give them height.

Creating the vignetteInterest vignetteCandlelit vignette

To distract from the brown paper backdrop, I made some rosemary wreaths by adding rosemary bunches to wooden hoops or a vine wreath base and hung them on top of the paper, at points around the room.

Other decoration ideas that I didn’t get photos of.

I asked friends to keep their empty wine bottles, and we put dinner candles in some and single white tulips in others and dotted them around the room.

On the serving tables we had green table cloths with runners of brown paper. Using sticky backed chalkboard roll and skewers I made little chalkboard flags for cheese names.

I hand lettered some witty cheese quotes in black pen on lengths of brown paper and hung those behind the cheese table. Similar to this chalkboard one:

I hope that there are some ideas here that you can steal for your event and that it all goes well! If you start with a theme, neutralising the room, space, lighting, and decoration, then beg, borrow and up-cycle to create your styled event then you are nearly there. After that it’s just the hard work of implementing it all!

This wreath feels like a bit like cheating. It is that simple, but I think it’s a great idea for your home if you’d like something a little different. If you have run out of time to get too fancy and just don’t want to bother with greenery. I have made a greenery swish, is that a word? But you don’t need any greenery for the wreath. This is a mirror wreath for a Christmas Hallway.

How to draw a mirror wreath

Equipment: HandMaterials: Mirror, Chalk pen

If you have a mirror in your entrance way or really anywhere in your home, then grab a chalk pen and just draw a wreath on. It’s a lovely way to make a mirror (that you don’t need to look in too much) feel Christmassy. It will take you less time than making a cup of tea!

Using a chalk pen made for glass, draw a circle. On the circle I drew some holly leaves and berries, you could draw a laurel wreath if you’d rather. I wrote the word Noel in the middle, honestly, because I wrote Happy Christmas but didn’t like my handwriting! To make the word look more substantial, thicken the down strokes of the letters. I then also drew random stars around the mirror. The even better thing about chalk pens is that if you make a mistake you can just rub it off and try again. I did this a few times! I’m now thinking after Christmas it will make a great reminder board for the kids in the school mornings, so they don’t forget their homework, PE kit, drinks bottle, manners(!), you know that kind of thing!

How to make an ivy swag

For my Christmas hallway, I added some ivy that I tied together to the top of the mirror. To make an ivy drapery thingy, you want to take some ivy that you’ve rescued some trees from. Place the ivy in a bundle so that some of the tendrils lie towards the right and some towards the left. Using some florists wire, tie stems together at different points. Don’t tie all the stems together, tie a couple together at a time. This keeps the thickness of the bunch. I also added in some holly sprigs that have red berries on.

My mirror was pine colour and I decided to paint it to match the bench underneath, I love how they now match. I hammered in some tacks to the top of the frame and hung three baubles from the tacks.

You might want to think about little touches to bring it all together, like using an accent colour. I chose red and put in a red large lantern that I got from IKEA one year and I chose red acorn baubles deliberately. My top tip; tie a red scarf around a cushion to add colour and a Christmas touch to the scene, it saves buying a new cover! I added a blanket to look cosy and dangled a white scarf with pompoms that look a little like snowballs, out of the baskets under the bench.

I’ve also brought in my sled which the kids thought was hilarious and kept asking – ‘is it going to snow this year?’ I don’t know about that but I just like the vibe it is setting plus the red tips of the sled work with the styling!